On wax, Brent Faiyaz often comes off as laconic and over it, qualities that have made his moody brand of so-called “toxic” R&B one of the genre’s most exciting prospects in years. But when we meet at his hotel near Central Park on a sunny July afternoon, about a week before the release of his new album, Wasteland, he’s quite the opposite: affable and chatty, exuding a palpably excited energy about his new music and career. The stakes are clear: This is his moment, and he knows it.
Faiyaz has a real lust for life, his music borne out of his nomadic, fast-living interests: meeting people, going places, and partying. His too-cool-to-sweat persona has become his trademark, and he abruptly shakes off any sign of worry. After letting slip an admission that he was nervous about the reception to the album, he does a 180 and says, coolly, “Fuck it, let it fly.” His nerves were not misplaced, though, as Wasteland since proved to be critically divisive, earning praise and critique alike for subverting expectations and pushing boundaries on his prior sound. It’s a provocation of a record and its challenging material seems to have worked wonders for the burgeoning star, landing him his highest-charting album to date, reaching all the way to #2 on the Billboard 200. This week he is set to release the first music video from the album for the track, “Loose Change,” perhaps hoping to keep the discourse around the record going for a little while longer.
Faiyaz, 26, hides his eyes behind subtly glamorous black shades, his afro stands tall, and the flashiest thing on him is an audacious diamond-studded cross on a chain. Faiyaz doesn’t need the ice or outfits to draw attention; he has the joie de vivre and presence of a true-blue superstar, unflappable and free of self-doubt. When, with a matter-of-fact, intense, deadpan confidence, he makes the absolute heat-check of a statement that he’s “getting ready to take over the world” and there’s never been anything in R&B like “what he’s putting out,” he exudes such a dogmatic belief in himself that it makes you second-guess any rebuttal.
On Wasteland, we find Brent at his apex of self-assuredness. He’s made a hip, post-genre soul record with plenty of the “formulaic sex, drugs, rock & roll shit” (as he refers to it) that fans have come to love him for—but there’s also a deeper examination of our post-pandemic world, and the title alludes to the realities and afflictions of the youth in America. “In a lot of ways it’s like a sequel to [my sophomore album Fuck the World],” he says. “After the world is fucked, here we are in the wasteland. I feel like that’s just the world we’re living in, from the bullshit our government is on, to financial crises, to the cultural bullshit everyone has to deal with every five minutes, this shit is just a mess right now.”
If that sounds maudlin, don’t worry. Wasteland can also be very charming, and features some of his bounciest and most evocative songs. But Brent can only make music that’s personal. In his songs he shows us the world through his singular POV, delivering his vision of the human costs of a world in shambles. “I definitely feel like I’m a product of this post-pandemic world, this sort of dystopia, and I’m just making music about how I feel,” he says. “It’s all relative though. I might hit a point where I’m super-happy, and make an album called Wonderland next.”
Faiyaz was born Christopher Brent Wood in Columbia, Maryland in 1995, a little under 30 miles north of Washington, D.C., and about 20 miles from Baltimore. To him, the quiet suburb was a dull in-betweenland, cut off from the cultural civilization, the kind of place a kid longs to escape from. “It ain’t a whole lot of shit going on in the suburbs” he says of his old stomping grounds. “I was a broke n-gga at the time so I wasn’t really going out looking for short-term thrills like that. I spent all of my time recording music.” He first started making music at 12, back when he was more interested in being a rapper. His first EP Black Child is a rarity now, but on it you can hear the scrappy beginnings of Faiyaz searching for an identity. “I moved out at 18 because my people got tired of me making so much noise with my recording. My father didn’t like that shit so I had to go. I had to thug it.”
By 2014, he’d made his way to Los Angeles and began making music that is much more recognizable to the Brent you hear today. Inspired by Chance the Rapper’s grassroots movement, Brent and his manager Ty Baisen built their own independent following through extensive touring and by gaming the streaming math of services like Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. “It was slow growth being independent,” he says about those early years. “We were still broke for a long time, I didn’t really start making real money until, like, three years ago.” With Ty’s help, Brent was able to organically build a real, loyal (if small) cult fan base.
Then he caught a huge break. Around the same time he’d left Maryland for Los Angeles, back home the DMV area started buzzing with a lot of local talent like IDK, Fat Trel, Rico Nasty, Abdu Ali, Kelela, Shy Glizzy, and Goldlink. “The DMV music scene wasn’t really a thing until I left and I started seeing so many artists in the area come up. When I was making music while in school there was nobody coming from there really. You had Wale, but as far as an underground scene of people supporting our own, that wasn’t a thing.” While Brent didn’t properly come up through the DMV scene, he would fortuitously link up with Goldlink at a studio when the rapper came out to LA. “I heard about him but I wasn’t too familiar with his music. He played me some stuff he was working on and played some beats for me, and I picked one track out like, ‘Let’s do that one.’” That track eventually became “Crew,” an electric, slick party record that also featured Shy Glizzy, making it something of a DMV anthem that acted as a boon to all three artists’ profiles, giving them their highest charting Billboard single and a Grammy nomination for Best Rap/Sung Performance. “That shit launched my whole shit,” Brent says, with total admiration. Making the record and the accolades that came with it proved to be intoxicating, and validated all his work over the years.
Riding this momentum, Brent released two big projects: his first album, 2017’s Sonder Son, a charming R&B album full of odes to exes and homies alike; and Into, his experimental EP credited to Sonder—a side endeavor with the producers Atu and Dpat.
Brent has always been something of a scientist with his sound, finding ways big and small to experiment and innovate. In the early days, his velvet voice was enough to make him stand out amongst the mellow, soulection-era/neo-neo-soul set, but since then, his production and affect has gotten darker, hazier, more esoteric and eclectic—full of gothic wails, heavy bass, dream pop pianos, and electronic synths. A lot of this subtlety is missed by the general public, who mostly just think of Brent as the guy that makes soul music for your toxic relationships, another in a long line of post-Frank Ocean, “whispery” R&B music. Sometimes he finds this frustrating, but Brent admits that’s “all ego.” “There are times where I feel like, I’m really that nigga,” he says with a matter-of-fact braggadacio, treating the idea of “toxic” as nothing more than a derisive label that undersells the music the way labels tend to. “People need to find ways to make things make sense to them. They still love it though.”
By Brent’s 2020 sophomore release, the EP Fuck The World, he’d begun to hit his stride, making some of the best music of his career. But any forward momentum was stalled by the fact that the album was released in February 2020, just weeks before the pandemic stopped everything. “The project had just dropped and I wasn’t able to work it the way I’d like to because I couldn’t do interviews and I couldn’t shoot no videos. The pandemic kinda fucked all that up. My streams were still going up, though, so I was making more money than I’d ever made at the time.”
While the world was on pause, Brent Faiyaz seemed to be picking up speed. “Since the pandemic I moved cities about three times, had six different girlfriends, just doing mad different shit, buying shit.” He traveled from country to country, studio to studio, making a lot of music, some of which he released. “During that time, I felt like I wanted to make something that I thought would live forever. The way I saw it, whoever came out [during the pandemic] with that crazy shit was gonna grab that moment, and I wanted it to be me.”
Out of that period came Wasteland, the album he feels will officially usher him into the superstar club. It’s loaded with guest stars like Drake, Alicia Keys, and Tyler, The Creator. But most importantly, it features Brent making the music he “always wanted to make,” songs as indebted to Cocteau Twins and Radiohead as they are to Lauryn Hill and The-Dream (who co-wrote four Wasteland tracks, including “Loose Change”).
So much of how Brent has grown as an artist has been an outgrowth of his time in studios, making music to catalog where his life is at any given point. Meeting and collaborating with peers and legends alike has changed his approach to art. He tells me about how Radiohead’s willingness to switch up their sound and energy with every album has heavily influenced him as an artist and producer. When we talk about major artists like Drake and Beyoncé making dance records, he talks eloquently about the artistic desire to push oneself and try shit for its own sake even if fans can’t understand or get into it. (“People want to tell Drake all the things he should’ve done on his album, but you’d never tell Picasso how he should be painting.”) He talks glowingly about the surreality of working with Keys. “[The Diary of Alicia Keys] was my introduction to music,” he says. “She’s so cool you forget who she is until she starts playing and you remember she’s a real musical genius.” He mentions conversations with the super-producer No ID about the politics of sound, and how fans misinterpret what artists are doing with theirs. “It’s all a choice. People seem to think you’re not capable of singing if you don’t sing a certain way, or they think you’re not capable of making music about certain subjects. It’s literally all by choice. All these mufuckas can make any type of music you’d want, but it comes down to them wanting to do things differently.” As frustrating as Brent finds this dynamic, there is something about the psychology at play between artists—especially musicians—and their fanbase that clearly intrigues him. “People are used to digesting R&B, specifically, in a particular way. Everybody wants to hear you do some Keith Sweat type shit and it’s like, this is a whole ‘nother generation, a whole other era. If you want some Keith Sweat shit, listen to Keith Sweat.”
Brent Faiyaz is constantly thinking about the positions of himself and other artists as well as the fans out there. He’s naturally inquisitive, and his constant traveling around the globe has allowed him to meet all kinds of people and gain a keener insight into the world. That’s where “sonder,” a word that recurs in his art and which he has tattooed above his eyebrow, comes from: the idea that every person is living a life as complex as yours. There’s always been a universality to his music, something anyone who has ever been young and full of emotions or pathos can easily relate to. But there’s something deeper at play. When Brent talks about his conversations with legends and strangers alike, he’s evangelizing for true human connection. “That’s what I love about New York,” he says. “If you just leave the house on a random day by yourself, you’re liable to have a very valuable conversation with somebody that day.” He values learning new things, and he feels like all that accrued knowledge has prepared him for the current moment. “With every project I’ve made, it’s all been leading up to this. I’ve been trying to get here.” He’s making it count too. He’s got a plan for the tour and more music videos and brand sponsorships, though he remains coy on the details. He might be where he always hoped to be as an artist, but he’s still remaining every bit the model student of life and industry. “I wanna take this shit over, everything from film to fashion to every endeavor, I just wanna take it over. I wanna learn about all of it and I’m soaking up game everywhere I go.”